Current Events > Completed a replay of Virtue's Last Reward! and uhhh oh no

(+) Yeah! (+)

After my first playthrough I came away thinking this was incredible. Best visual novel I'd ever played, one of the best stories in gaming, etc. etc.. I replayed Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors before this and it was even better than I remembered. Even though I knew the twists, the buildup and emotional impact of them still made them very effective. One gave me goosebumps despite me knowing exactly when it was going to happen.

So I was excited to replay VLR and uuuuh. Eeeeh. It didn't hold up.

Problem Number One: The characters do not get much development. Nearly all the character interactions are just inane bickering and arguing. There's barely any extra dialogue in puzzle rooms that isn't puzzle related. You can get a sense of "this guy's good at heart", "this guy's a dick", but there's really nothing interesting about them beyond what they mean for the story. I liked a lot of the characters in the first game. Here, I liked maybe one.

Problem Number Two: It's so miserable. And not in a way that feels deliberate. There's barely any warmth or charm to any of it. There's a handful of your anime pervy jokes, but 98% of the emotion in the game is crying and arguing. I don't want to compare it to much to 999, but that game was a tense situation with horrific events going on, but there was still warm moments. People laughing, getting on, moments that had emotion beyond "this is really horrible". Nearly every character is an asshole. And the very few that aren't go through such absolute misery that it's not much comfort. You can't get through the game without being horrible to other characters. It's just misery.

Problem Number Three: Bloated repeated content. You can skip through conversations you've barely seen and thank god. What is the point in having so many routes when there's only around 3 that actually have different stuff going on? You're very very unlikely to reach an actual ending on your first route that isn't a "TO BE CONTINUED", basically stopping the route until you go and trigger something somewhere else and come back. In 999 this would show you an alternate path or ending if you didn't have the required trigger, but here, the game just stops. It's not very good. Going through the routes feels less like "Oh I wonder what would happen if I had done that" and more "sigh okay time to tackle this path and see what arbitrarily differs this time".

A shame. I'm excited to replay Zero Time Dilemma now though, because I can barely remember anything about it.

yeah i feel the same way about VLR compared to 999, 999 is one of my favorite games ever but VLR just doesn't hold up